Re: debian-mipsel installed on a Cobalt Qube2

[Neale Pickett <neale@debian.org>]

So then, Karsten Merker <karsten@excalibur.cologne.de> is all like:

> I have no Qube but at least for my NASRaq you need to have an absolute
> minimalistic configured kernel - the compressed kernel image can be at
> most 600 and a few kilobytes (do not know the exact limit - somewhere
> between 600 and 620). If the kernel is larger, the system crashes
> while loading the kernel. Try building a vmlinux, strip it and then
> compress it with gzip -9.  If the result is below 610kB, you should
> give it a try. The NetBSD/cobalt docs talk of a limit of about 1MB,
> which seems to wrong at least for my box.

Now this is encouraging news!  I think the NASRaq uses the same hardware
as the Qube 2700.  What's in /proc/cpuinfo?  If the bogomips is under
230, it's probably the same.  I think my Qube 2700 ran somewhere around
150 (it's on loan to someone else right now).

I did play around with tiny kernels on my Qube 2700: I built a 2.4.19
kernel with practically nothing in it--the tulip driver was even built
as a module.  But it was still over 1MB uncompressed:

  -rw-r--r--    1 neale    neale     1365300 Oct 18 10:44 vmlinux
  -rwxr-xr-x    1 neale    neale      497295 Oct 18 10:44 vmlinux.gz

This one didn't boot either.  Maybe I didn't take enough out.

What version of the kernel are you using?  Would you mind sending the
output of 
  egrep -v '^(#.*)?$' .config
to the list?  Here's what mine is:

  neale@qubert:/usr/local/src/linux-2.4.19$ egrep -v '^(#.*)?$' .config
  CONFIG_MIPS=y
  CONFIG_MIPS32=y
  CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL=y
  CONFIG_MODULES=y
  CONFIG_MIPS_COBALT=y
  CONFIG_RWSEM_GENERIC_SPINLOCK=y
  CONFIG_COBALT_LCD=y
  CONFIG_PCI=y
  CONFIG_NEW_IRQ=y
  CONFIG_NEW_TIME_C=y
  CONFIG_NONCOHERENT_IO=y
  CONFIG_CPU_NEVADA=y
  CONFIG_CPU_HAS_LLSC=y
  CONFIG_CPU_HAS_LLDSCD=y
  CONFIG_CPU_LITTLE_ENDIAN=y
  CONFIG_NET=y
  CONFIG_SYSVIPC=y
  CONFIG_SYSCTL=y
  CONFIG_KCORE_ELF=y
  CONFIG_BINFMT_ELF=y
  CONFIG_PACKET=m
  CONFIG_PACKET_MMAP=y
  CONFIG_UNIX=m
  CONFIG_INET=y
  CONFIG_IP_MULTICAST=y
  CONFIG_IP_PNP=y
  CONFIG_IPV6=m
  CONFIG_IDE=y
  CONFIG_NETDEVICES=y
  CONFIG_NET_ETHERNET=y
  CONFIG_NET_PCI=y
  CONFIG_TULIP=y
  CONFIG_AUTOFS_FS=m
  CONFIG_AUTOFS4_FS=m
  CONFIG_EXT3_FS=m
  CONFIG_JBD=m
  CONFIG_RAMFS=y
  CONFIG_PROC_FS=y
  CONFIG_EXT2_FS=y
  CONFIG_NFS_FS=m
  CONFIG_NFS_V3=y
  CONFIG_NFSD=m
  CONFIG_NFSD_V3=y
  CONFIG_SUNRPC=m
  CONFIG_LOCKD=m
  CONFIG_LOCKD_V4=y
  CONFIG_SMB_FS=m
  CONFIG_PARTITION_ADVANCED=y
  CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION=y
  CONFIG_SMB_NLS=y
  CONFIG_NLS=y
  CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT="iso8859-1"

(Hmm, those NLS codepages are probably taking up a lot of space...)

Neale